Thursday, March 22, 2018

This covers my 6th blog aligned with my work anniversary, a successor to http://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2017/02/this-one-is-for-20-or-anniversarynext5.html. I always mean to post this on the anniversary day, but I'm a bit laggard this year. Luckily this is a personal blog with random musings, so I don't have to worry about conformance to an SLA or other criteria... This anniversary year marks crossing the 21 year marker. As a multiple of 7, we have both a lucky number and also a milestone for sabbatical eligibility.

This is a forum where cloud service providers (CSP's), hardware, firmware, and software parties can engage on how to further ease development of servers in a more open, community fashion. This includes many types of lower-level boot firmware, OS hand-off interfaces, etc. Very much a pragmatic, 'getting things done' type of group.

Again back to the scale of scale. For the original Itanium we had closed source SAL, PAL, BIOS, and partially open source EFI sample. Now we can build a server image from content off the web. Quite the evolution over these last 2 decades.
Beyond the bits and bytes of the technology, the view of others on platform firmware standards like UEFI and ACPI is sometimes amusing. For example, many people type 'uEFI' (micro-EFI?) versus the full UEFI, or pronounce UEFI as 'YOO-FEE.' We typically just pronounce each letter, U-E-F-I. Less often I've heard ACPI as ACK-PEE, including Heasman in his '07 talk https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-07/Heasman/Presentation/bh-usa-07-heasman.pdf. This reminds me of my teen-age years, pre-internet, and growing up in Texas, when I'd read a lot of philosophy books, including Berkeley and Hegel. When I later had an opportunity to discuss these writers with others, I'd invariably mispronounce the names (e.g., HEGEL versus HAY-GEL, BERKLEY versus BARK-LEY). I guess we've all had this problem of reading a name for years but not hearing it spoken aloud.

It's time to close this tardy blog. I surely missed addressing some interesting events since my last blog posting given the many month absence from blogging. As such, the choice of topics herein less represent overall importance than proximity in time. So please assess using that lens.